Hi all,

A recent spate of apt-getting my (i386) Sarge system has left me with some mysterious problems. The most immediate is that on reboot the /dev/null permisions are being set to 660 (crw-rw----). Is there any way of tracking down what is resetting this? (There's nothing in /var/log/syslog, message, debug, etc. that seems relevant, none of the scripts in /etc/init.d are chmod-ing it, and udev appears to be correctly configured.)

This problem makes kdm do very strange things. But if I set the permissions from console and start KDE manually, more strange stuff happens: no program requiring root access will run (apparently "su" cannot be found, although it's in my $PATH), nor will x shells (I've tried xterm and konsole).

So far I've removed, reinstalled, and reconfigured xwindows and kde, and done a dist-upgrade in case there was some odd inconsistency. I've also done some of the recommended things that sometimes fix x-windows and KDE provblems (clear out tmp directories and start with an empty ~/.kde directory).

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

UPDATE

I've just noticed (because I was getting the error "PRNG not seeded" when trying to use ssh) that ALL the /dev files except symlinks, /dev/hdc (my CD-RW) and my current terminal session are set to 660 with ownership root.root; much as I look forward to figuring out what groups and permissions they should actually have, I'm not optimistic that any changes I make will survive a re-boot.

It looks like udev is creating the device files with entirely the wrong permissions. There's a similar problem described on the debian-user list(http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/.../msg00583.html), but with no replies so far.

Hi!

Just go into

and add a symlink

This helped me. :-)

ChrisDi